This may be the very first game that suffers from an overdeveloped story, and a bad one at that. This title tries to present itself as a Hollywood super production with its dramatic movie sequences, long winded dialogs, heavy characterization and obligatory plot twists. In essence, those would be excellent elements to have in a game, unfortunately, the makers of this piece of software dedicated the lion´s share of the development into those aforementioned elements and forgot to put a real game into it. If you have ever played one of those electronic Simon games, available at most toy stores, then you´ll feel right at home. That´s right, believe it or not, 75% of the gameplay in Indigo Prophecy is comprised of a simple repetition of color pattern sequences. During the interactive video sequences, two of these Simon boards appear on screen and by simply moving both analog sticks to match the position of the blinking colored lights (either up, down, left or right; no diagonals people) You either pass or fail said sequences, if you happen to fail, don´t fret, starting over means repeating the exact same sequence without variation, which in turn, makes of these quick timer events mere memory exercises. Some of these sequences affect your progress, miss enough times and it is game over, while others affect character exposure and storyline, failing in those events cause you to miss part of the storytelling (not a big deal, I assure you.) The remaining part of the game that is not comprised of these dual Simon moments, are basic at best, from picking the right path in the speech trees, keeping a marker balanced in between a gauge bar, to looking for objects within a room to solve a puzzle, you have done this on other games, far better too. There are a few action oriented sequences where you get to control your character, but these are so few, far between and fleeting in nature that are gone before the player can get a real sense of achievement out of them. And that is the main problem with Indigo Prophecy; everything about the gameplay is so basic, shallow and repetitive that the developers had to lay a heavy coat of pseudo drama to try to hide the titles´ shortcomings. And I´m afraid that the game´s underachieving nature extends to its technical aspects as well. The graphics are permeated with a drab, mudded color palette. The textures have a low quality to them and some of the environments present low polygon counts in certain places. While the main characters animate well thanks to the use of motion capture, some of its facial movements and expressions come out somewhat as from a robot. Sound and music are just there doing their job without being memorable at all, it is just generic at best.
In the end that is all Indigo Prophecy amounts to, a failed attempt at creating a compelling, mature game for and adult audience. And it fails mainly because it lacks that one element all gamers look for: and engaging gameplay experience. You will find no such thing here.
As snow falls innocently outside the bathroom window, a man sits quietly, his forearms freshly cut with the symbol of two snakes. Rivers of blood run from his fingertips. A silent crow watches from behind the frozen glas... Read Full Review
A while back I went through a phase where I was playing a lot of adventure games on the PC, and Indigo Prophecy was on my "to get" list. Then I bought a PS2 and my PC gaming went on the back burner. A couple ... Read Full Review
